Hello there ETC people! Have been a supporter for quite some time now, but was never too much of a talker, more of a quiet yet active observer. Some profess to know how much a coin will hit by such and such date, some even predict everyday. People doing their research is excellent, especially when in blockchain and cryptocurrency; the why and the what, the if and the then, the if and when, and all those things need to be considered, most definitely.

The one problem though is… getting your news or creating forecasts based on other peoples research or others peoples opinion is most of what you see out there in cryptoland. I decided to join this forum because of my ever-growing interests in ETC, blockchain tech development and as a software engineer, I am attempting at reaching out and start helping people and not scamming people, create real use cases for my people, San Juan, Puerto Rico.

The one thing that has kept me and my partner going is our trust in blockchain… After Maria, Category 5 hurricane, hit my tiny island home, the devastation has been unspeakable, the suffering unexplainable, and the corruption hyper inflated. Funds that were meant for people in need ended up in the hands of tricksters, who claimed on the same aid via 5-10 different aliases or dependents. For a while I had no idea what my assets were worth, if orders had executed, nothing. There was no Data in the entire island… The hurricane to this day keeps large communities without electricity, drinking water, and shelter needless to say.

When systems started being restored, and they are still undergoing massive rebuilding, I saw that all my assets and especially ETC were all good, and that if all else was lost here, I had the ability to move with my partner, somewhere where we would at least not have to make a 4 hour line to fill up 10$ worth of gas in your car. It was, has been, is, and continues to be a struggle to live here, when I live and breath technology, and the red tape for innovation is clear and very tangible.

So I digress… This was supposed to be an introduction post and I went all anecdotal …
I will share my knowledge and hope to gain more here as well.
Hello ETC community!!!
Unherduf#ETC#introduce-yourself#random

Welcome to the forums and the community! Glad to hear you’re recovering from Maria and working on positive things in PR (hopefully one day the 51st state). Sorry to hear that so many others haven’t yet, it really is a shame that some choose to take advantage.

Thank you for the welcome @anthony . I also do hope for someday to be treated as real citizens. I sometimes think that in an utopia, Puerto Rico could be an independent nation, and have its own role in goe-politics, but being called “The Commonwealth” of Puerto Rico is hardly true, as “The Commonwealth” of Pennsylvania is a state, but my island has been used and my people have been conditioned at a pavlovian level to depend on the system and numbing the minds of those that attempt to awaken the mass. 500 years of being someone’s property is too much psychologically to try and explain a different point of view to a normal regular Joe. Its all about political parties, red vs blue, and green (independence…hmm ETC logo’s green correlations??) which accounts for like 4% of voters.

When you ask someone about a “Free associated state” you end up at the entomological root of this concept: A Colony, and such is the case, that right now, more than ever, Puerto Rico is the last colony of the “Free World” where the experimentation is still allowed. Let’s break it down:

Free, 2. Associated, 3. State. This is, in other words, a self negation of each declaration. Since Free we are not, the Federal Government has last say oven any decision made about Puerto Rico, 2. Associated, yes, we are a strategic point of the Caribbean where they sought out to have a island wide military base. Associated in dependence, as the US made our farmers grown “monocultivos” which translates to single item farming. From strictly coffee, to then Sugar and sugar and then forget the coffee, lets just solely grow and export all sugar, forget about all the fruit that can grow here. When that is done to the soil, it gets ruined, and an industry that had multiple baskets and multiple eggs, ends up with a single basket for all the same type of eggs. Same as in investing, same as in crypto. Many coins, tokens, and assets, many potential values many scams too… same as in real life.

The local government in Puerto Rico can’t make an executive decision on it’s own. Without the approval and allowance of the Financial Oversight Board, a special tactical Taskforce created & installed by the US Federal Government in Puerto Rico. So, our Commander in Chief, voted and elected by the people, can’t really take action on a myriad of decisions that are part of the job description without having to run in by this Federal entity which can say yes or nay, at their whim, as their main interest is to focus on getting the national debt issue resolved, and yet we undergo a category 5+ hurricane, and our current president comes for a few hours to Puerto Rico and is taken through the “nicest” areas of the metro area, and he had the nerve to hand out rolls of paper-towel. Paper towel…

I keep digressing… this is also a reason why I try and stay out of forums as I become hyper focused and can end up writing an essay if im talking about something I feel strongly. At this point become #51 is probably the best resolution to the problem. Not setting up a semi democracy, with an oversight board, that actually sounds more like control of the people, not we exist to aid the people, a dictatorship?!

Im glad that Anthony thinks that hopefully PR will become the 51st state… I hope this does happen as well.

Outside of that, #introduce-yourself#ETC is in dev mode… I can tell. Im all about having additional options to what our system offers, so ETC is right up my alley. I have been programming and have no idea how I have survived the “Lost Monster” that engulfed #PuertoRico on September 20, 2017. That is why now in #rebuild mode, #infrastructure needs to be put in place and as pirate blood runs in most of us from this Island. We have that sense in our nature, or at least the few of “us” that I know.

Id like to work more closely with code, Scala, or Python or any other software development language to contribute more to this and other communities, as I know people need help out there, so do people here.
I feel privileged that my electricity is back up and water is working, and whoa internet! But a very sad truth is that there are a lot of mountain towns that have lost it all and still are waiting for aid, which apparently there is none left.

Perfect blockchain use case. An open ledger for all funds provided to help Puerto keep from #collapsing. But this is now a new buzzing, trendy thing in PR. Everyone knows more than you about crypto, or blockchain or coins, or yada yada yada,… I keep to myself and throw some knowledge out there when I see it, when It comes to me, and I would love to have mass adoption in #PR but not have it be through a main chain or some gimmick which always ends up being a horro fest in side effects.

Thanks again for the mention. Positivity is key indeed, and as long as I can keep developing and creating, life is ok. and ok is good for me. ok let’s me do things like:

Glad to see how passionate you are though, that attitude should serve you well in blockchain. If you haven’t already you may want to join our Discord: https://discord.gg/HgBa9b4

For Scala you could always try contributing to IOHK’s Mantis node software: https://github.com/input-output-hk/mantis
For python I’d say one thing to start with is firing up a node (parity, geth, mantis) and using the requests/json libraries to make queries to their JSON-RPC.